Nostalgia - Frankenwolf and friendship

Let me tell you a bit about my girl Frankenwolf.
Frankenwolf has to thank my friend Jenn and a mutual friend of ours for her existence. Said friend - also a collector - had asked her at one time to take a Steiff puppet and a Steiff figure and turn them into a new creation.
That inspired Jenn to do the same with Frankenwolf.

Now that might sound quite gruesome to you, beheading two Steiffs and sewing them together, but of course that's just part of the story.
Let's have a look at Frankenwolf's donors.

Steiff has a long history of making German Shepherd dogs, they have been around for over 100 years. Their ancestors, however, still had a bad image which was probably the reason why it took until 1956 before they appeared in Steiff's production.
The first Steiff wolf was a hand puppet named Loopy after the Latin "lupus" which means wolf. That's not surprising to me as there weren't just nice, cuddly puppets, but it could also be useful to have a "villain" (like our childhood non-Steiff devil who was my favorite with his red head). Loopy was produced from 1956 to 1978. He had an open mouth with four fangs and a long red felt tongue. It wasn't unusual for fangs and/or tongues to get lost during play eventually, though.

I always called the one on the right Grandma Wolf,
she seems to be a very happy wolf.

The wolf remained a rare animal in Steiff's line. There are two sizes of a standing Loopy - the smaller one has a closed, the bigger one an open mouth - which were only made for one year in 1964 (one of my personal favorites). Later wolves sometimes turned up as a companion, for example with a Red Riding Hood doll or a polar bear.
The puppet used for Frankenwolf was in very bad shape. Actually, it's surprising that it still had all the fangs. Before throwing the head away as well, though, this was definitely the better choice.

The body was taken from a Micki figure who had a different problem.
First a (very short) word about Mecki. He's a hedgehog who originally came from a German puppet film and became the mascot of a TV magazine where he got his own cartoon. Mecki's wife is called Micki, the children Macki and Mucki. The character had always been quite popular (to be honest, I have never been a fan myself), so Steiff got themselves the licensing rights and made their own versions of the whole family from 1951 on.
Now the early versions had a little problem. The heads were made from rubber which tended to dry out and deteriorate. Later versions were made of a different material.

Pictures by NoName_13 via Pixabay

Well, and Micki had the same problem, but her body was quite okay (even if she had lost her apron and her shoes are a bit scuffed).
Jenn also added a tail and different arms.

Frankenwolf means more to me, however, than just being a unique addition to my collection.
A few years ago I told a little about how I met Jenn. The ex and I were in the USA for the first time and got the chance to visit FAO Schwarz in San Francisco (which closed down over 20 years ago). Steiff made some wonderful and desired FAO Schwarz specials over the years some of which you can see in this video. We were like children in a candy store ... no, wait, toy store 😉

FAO Schwarz Manhattan, picture by Rob Young
 from the UK, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia

When we had exhausted ourselves (and our wallets just a little bit), we asked if there was something like an American Steiff club or a way to get in contact with other collectors. They didn't have any information on that, but they gave us Jenn's number (let me remind you that data privacy wasn't such a big thing yet back then and in this case I'm very glad about that). Jenn had repaired studio Steiffs - amazing lifesize plush animals - for them before.
Then we sat in our hotel room and the ex decided I had to call Jenn. I was so nervous. How do you explain best to a stranger that you got their number from the toy store because you are a German Steiff collector? I needn't have worried. After five minutes, she offered to show us around everywhere. I told her that unfortunately we were leaving the next day, and that could have been the end of it - but it wasn't.
We exchanged addresses and started writing each other letters, then we went from letters to phone calls which might show you how important this had become for us. This was before cell phones and texting, emails or chats.

The next year we went to the US again and that time we would meet Jenn in San Francisco and I would go home with her where the ex would join his conference was over. That was also when I fell in love with White Dude, by the way, the cat that the previous residents had left behind at Jenn's place and who went back to Germany with us as her own cats didn't want him there, little punks (I loved them, anyway).

That was almost 35 years ago.
We visited Jenn, she visited us, later just me. We have a lot of stories and memories, good ones and not so good ones because that's how life is.
I wish we didn't have about 5,800 air miles between us and could just hang out, have tea (or tap water that she insists on 😉) and cake, talk, laugh, and do fun stuff. The distance makes spontaneous dates just a tad difficult. Time difference and work schedules can also make it difficult to talk, but when we do, we get a lot of stuff covered.

When I said that Frankenwolf means more to me than just a toy, this is what I mean. Friendship. She does ... and my little gnome you have seen before does ... and the surprises Jenn got me on fleamarkets, the teddies she taught me how to sew, and the time she gave me a duplicate key to her place as a sign of her friendship which actually made me tear up.
Can someone please finally invent that transporting device that I need so badly?
But even if we haven't seen one another for several years, we think of each other, and I sure hope I made her ears ring now. As we always say to each other at the end of a call .... love ya, my Jenn.

Random Saturday - Where did they go?

A few months ago, I said goodbye to Sharon McCone when I got the last book in the series. Yeah, that was a little premature because I had actually missed the book before that, but it was nice to end on that one now because I liked it better than the last one.
I also mentioned being sad when I read the last Discworld and Kinsey Millhone books after Terry Pratchett and Sue Grafton had died.

The other day it was time again to go through my books for a little purge. That's when I came upon the three books by Sandra West Prowell.

I got my first book by Sandra West Prowell at a fleamarket - not the first book in the series - and I was captured right away by her protagonist, the FBI agent turned private detective Phoebe Siegel living in Montana.
Phoebe comes from a Jewish-Catholic family, her father and one of her brothers were policemen.
Inheriting a lot of money from her aunt gives Phoebe the chance to buy an old house and to offer her services as a private detective at very reasonable fees. Feeling a connection to the victims is her main incentive.

The books are not Whodunits, they don't just tell the story of her cases, but also of problems within the family and of her relationships, but not in a way I find annoying. Of course that could have to do with there only being three books.
Character development is good, but it can also bring you down if for example the protagonist doesn't seem to have one happy moment in their life over I don't know how many books which has been a reason for me to abandon more than one series. Life can be depressing enough.

However, this is not supposed to be a review of Prowell's books, after all it's random Saturday.
I want to talk about why there are only three books. The last book had one of those short author introductions saying "... and is currently working on the fourth volume about detective Phoebe Siegel."
I was looking forward to that, to a new case and to see how her relationship with the Native American deputy would be coming along.
So every, now and then I looked her up, but the fourth novel never came, not even in English. Then I would forget about it again. I did that on and off for almost ten years wondering where Prowell had disappeared to, not obsessively, but usually when I put a book in my cabinet in a spot close to her books.
Weirdly enough, I can't remember having done the same with other authors. I guess it was that introduction. If she had been working on a new book, what had happened?

I'm also one of those people who watch some old movie or show and wonder where this actress or that actor has ended up and then look them up. I want to make clear, however, that I don't fall for those terrible clickbait YouTube videos showing fake pictures of someone's "gruesome fate"; and thinking about it, I usually limit my search to actors, actresses or authors (and sometimes cats and dogs I have become attached to on the web which may lead to tears, but that's a different story).

One day, much to my surprise, I found something, a post from November 2016 on Lise McClendon's website. McClendon also writes mystery and was a friend of Prowell until they lost touch.
She wrote the post on the day she found out about her friend's death over one year before.
Obviously, Prowell had unknown issues that not only made her stop writing (although the fourth Phoebe Siegel was supposed to be published in 2000 or 2001, and there was another standalone manuscript) and break off contact to writer friends, but that even made her stop talking about writing with her family.
I felt strangely sad about it. I don't know what I had expected to find, but that wasn't it.

Of course the same happens with people in our own lives. It's like a train. People go with you from the start to the end of the line, some go with you from just one to the next station, some get off suddenly, maybe even without saying goodbye, and sometimes you throw some off the train ... hm, maybe the analogy isn't that good, but you get the idea.
We can't expect to spend all our lives with always the same people around even if it may come as a shock if someone hops off without a warning after a long time.
With some people it's easier to accept, with others it isn't. Sometimes it hurts to feel you have been cut out of someone's life without knowing what you did or if it has to do with you at all. Sometimes you just drift apart and that's okay.
And sometimes you reach out and re-connect which may work out or not.

That reminds me that there's a friend I should call. It has been a while since we last talked.
Oh, and if you wonder, by the way, the Prowell books didn't get purged.

Source:
Lise McClendon: Remembering Sandra West Prowell. On:Lise McClendon, November 18, 2016